An art which, like music, is the offspring of passion and emotion, could not but take a dramatic form. The lyrical drama, secular and sacred, civilized humanity could not but produce. Nothing is more natural than that the gayety and grief of the heart should seek the intense and emphatic expression which music can afford. It would, indeed, be extraordinary if a creature like man—so covetous of excitement, so desirous of varying his sensations—did not press into his service, wherever it could be used, an art which has no other equal to it for excitement and variety. The opera, both comic and tragic, is a genuine production of this desire. The burlesque, the odd, the merry, the absurd, and, still more, pity, love, jealousy, vengeance, despair, have their music in the rudest states of society; it is only in the order of things that they should in cultivated states of society have a cultivated music. Such music, as a matter of course, would connect itself with a story, a plot, with incident, character, scenery, costume, and catastrophe. It would thus become dramatic. Thus it has become; and as such, it has a range as ample as that of human life, as deep as human passions, as versatile as the human fancy and the human will. Hence we have the opera. The opera is that form which the drama assumed among a people musically organized—among a people whose love of music was, therefore, intense, constitutional and expansive. But no art remains within the limits of its native space, and the opera is now as extensive as civilization; as extensive, certainly, as modern civilization. The ballad is the first comedy or tragedy. There are germs in the words of the ballet for the genius of Shakspeare—there are germs in the air of it for the genius of Rossini. Many object to the opera. First, they say, it is expensive. All our amusements are expensive—expensive as they ought not to be—expensive as they would not be with a higher and a purer social culture. Artistic amusements are expensive, especially, by the want of taste, which hinders the many from sharing in them—by the want of taste, which makes _expense_ itself distinction. True taste coincides with true feeling; true feeling delights in beauty, as it delights in goodness, for its own sake; and true feeling being wide as nature and humanity, the more widely its delight is shared the greater its own enjoyment. Were there among the people a diffusive taste for elevated music, we cannot but feel that music could be cheap as well as noble. But, secondly, many say that the opera is unnatural. It is absurd, they quizzically aver, that persons should sing their love-talk, their madness, their despair, etc., and grieve or laugh, and die or be married, in sharps or flats, in major or minor. And yet, this is exactly what nature does. Nature sings all its stronger emotions. The moment expression becomes excited it has rhythm—it has cadence; and the tune of Rossini is nearer to instinct than the blank verse of Shakspeare. Who will say that genuine passion is not in this wonderful blank verse? But who is it that could impromptu speak it? So in the tones and harmonies of music. In both nature is carried into the region of art, out from the region of the actual; and within the region of art the musical utterance of nature is no more strange than the poetical utterance of nature. The moral view of the opera I do not here pretend to deal with. My purpose is to speak on music as an element of social culture; and it is not beyond the range of possibility that beautiful truths can be united dramatically to beautiful tones. If they cannot, then society has an immense loss; and if a noble story cannot be told by music—cannot be told to a moral purpose, then music ceases to be an art, as it has always been considered as associated with the divinest impulses of our nature. The abuses of which the opera is susceptible, are the abuses of which every form of art is susceptible. The artist stands—he has ever stood—upon a point between the human and divine. He may carry his art into gross sensualities of the human, or into lofty spiritualities of the divine. With the purification of society we shall have the purification of art and of the artist; and, therefore, I can see no reason why the opera might not be made effective in the best culture of social humanity. The lyrical expression of humanity is not less human than it is religious.